Paul Suttman, Expressionist Offset Lithograph

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Paul Suttman, a sculptor best known for Impressionistic figurative works in bronze, died Wednesday at his home in South Kent, … Read more Paul Suttman, a sculptor best known for Impressionistic figurative works in bronze, died Wednesday at his home in South Kent, Conn. He was 59. The cause was heart failure, said Jacques Kaplan, an art dealer in Kent who represented him. Mr. Suttman, who was born July 16, 1933, in Enid, Okla., earned his bachelor of fine arts degree from the University of New Mexico in 1956 and his master's degree from the Cranbrook Academy of Art in 1958. He also studied with the Italian sculptor Giacomo Manzu. As a young man, Mr. Suttman designed and built racing cars, worked as a draftsman for the Atomic Energy Commission (predecessor to the Department of Engery) and was an assistant of the architect Eero Saarinen. He had his first exhibition with the Donald Morris Gallery in Detroit in 1959 and from 1962 to 1973 exhibited regularly at the Terry Dintenfass Gallery in New York. Mr. Suttman, who was awarded a Prix de Rome three times in the mid-1960s, lived in Italy from 1962 to 1975. His early work was sometimes compared with Rodin's and Renoir's because of its loose, Impressionistic surface. In the 1970s, his work became more precisely realistic and focused on life-size still lifes, often involving tables or tabletops, whose objects sometimes seem precariously balanced and about to fall. Mr. Suttman's work is represented in several public collections, including those of the Museum of Modern Art, the Morgan Library and the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington. See less